by Lynette Noni
“No.”
Jordan’s grin widened at Hunter’s quick and unyielding answer. Under his breath, he murmured an amused, “Worth a try.”
And it had been. Because many people, including Jordan, would give an arm and a leg to say they’d been gifted a weapon by Hunter—the fabled ‘Ghost’. Even just being loaned two of his Shadow Daggers was an honour, with them being a weapon few humans possessed, since Shadow Walkers rarely offered their blades to those of other races. Hunter had earned his, but how, Jordan didn’t know, with the legends being numerous and reaching mythical proportions. And rightly so, given that Hunter didn’t just have a pair of Shadow Daggers, but many, many other Shadow-infused weapons strapped to his person, along with the Shadow Cloak that he always wore. Whatever he’d done to receive such a prize must have made quite the impact on the notoriously difficult race.
Wondering what his chances were of convincing Hunter to share the true story, Jordan realised that perhaps a better time might avail itself later—such as when they weren’t about to try and provoke the attention of a monster.
As if reading his thoughts—and quite possibly doing something similar to that—Hunter said, quietly, “No more talking from here. Activate your gift—and be ready.”
Four
Jordan was hyper alert as they moved silently through the forest. Each crack of a twig underfoot, each brush of a branch snagging his coat, each rustle of leaves in the wind set his teeth on edge. He might have been invisible thanks to his now activated gift, but he felt as if the whole world could see him. Along with Every. Single. Creature. In. The. Woods.
He and Hunter had been walking in what felt like circles for nearly an hour, with no sign of any Hyroas. Jordan was growing weary from using his gift for so long, not to mention the physically demanding nature of slugging through the dense woodland. The climate was nowhere near as cold as the academy they’d left behind, so he was coated with sweat beneath his thick clothes. He desperately wanted to strip off some layers, but his instructions to keep silent meant he couldn’t call out to Hunter and ask to pause their onward trek.
Hunter himself maintained a short distance between the two of them, careful to remain within throwing reach but no closer, staying true to his plan to keep Jordan safe. Or as safe as possible, considering what, exactly, they were hunting.
Or rather, what was hunting them.
As they continued their jungle hike, Jordan became aware that his palms were sweating—along with the rest of him—and the golden egg-thing felt slick against his flesh. He only hoped that when the time came to crack it, it wouldn’t slip straight through his fingers. Hunter would never let him live it down.
… Presuming either of them survived to face the consequences.
Just as Jordan decided he was uncomfortable enough to risk falling behind if it meant he could shed some clothes, Hunter froze, prompting Jordan to do the same.
He noticed it immediately. The absolute silence, absolute stillness surrounding them. Even the wind had quieted, as if holding its breath in anticipation.
Muscles tensing, Jordan was locked and ready for whatever they were about to face. Or, he thought he was ready, but then Hunter jumped into motion and whirled to the left a fraction of a second before the foliage parted and a humongous shadow leapt out, talons the size of Jordan’s forearm extended, and landed right where Hunter had been standing.
“Mother—”
Jordan’s curse was drowned out by the Hyroa’s ferocious roar, its open mouth revealing razor-sharp teeth the length of his hand. He stumbled back a step when he caught sight of its eyes—dilated pupils surrounded by bright, glowing red, vibrant even in the dark of the forest. It was hideous… terrifying… a thing of nightmares.
And it was looking straight at him.
Jordan realised his mistake immediately. Hunter had told him to keep silent. When he’d uttered his oath, invisible or not, he might as well have held up a sign that said ‘free meal’. Because now the Hyroa had caught his scent, and with one push back onto its haunches, it spun around and leapt into the air, barrelling right for him.
It managed three, lightning-fast, ground-eating bounds before uttering a pained snarl and whirling back around, red eyes furious. And Jordan could see why, since when it turned, he caught sight of one of Hunter’s blades lodged deep into its hair-covered flesh. The size of the Hyroa meant the wound was but a pinprick, but it was enough to distract it from Jordan and turn it back to Hunter—which gave Jordan time to finally gather his wits about him.
Adrenaline pumping enough to launch him into action, Jordan sprinted forward as the Hyroa pounced back towards Hunter. He tightened his fist around the golden egg, praying with everything within him that the paralytic effects would work on something as mammoth as the nightmarish creature—and that the result would be instantaneous. Otherwise, they were screwed.
The Hyroa was almost upon Hunter when Jordan felt the shell crack between his fingers, and he didn’t hesitate to fling the golden sphere straight at the beast with all his strength. Mentally comparing it to flicking a grain of dirt at a mountain, Jordan’s confidence wavered when the egg bounced against the Hyroa’s back and fell harmlessly to the ground, all without any sign of the beast having been affected at all.
Certain he and Hunter were going to have to fight for their lives, Jordan drew out both his daggers and closed the remaining distance just as the Hyroa made one final leap towards Hunter—a leap that landed the beast right on top of the teacher, crashing them both to the ground.
Bellowing a war cry, Jordan lunged forward, daggers raised high. But at the very last second, he skidded to a stop when he heard Hunter’s muffled voice yelling, “STOP!”
Jordan was just inches away from gutting the beast, but somehow through the haze of adrenaline-spiked fear, he managed to process Hunter’s shout and realised the reason for it—the beast was no longer moving.
“H-Hunter?” Jordan panted, deactivating his gift as he squinted into the darkness and tried to find his teacher underneath the Hyroa’s hairy mass.
“I’m alive,” came Hunter’s still muffled voice. “Just help get this thing off me.”
Hands shaking, it took two attempts before Jordan was able to sheath his daggers—something he was loath to do, given the creature before him and the knowledge that there were more of them in the surrounding forests. Willing his trembling limbs to steady, together he and Hunter managed to push and heave the heavy bulk of the Hyroa to the side enough that the teacher was able to scramble out from under it.
“That was close,” Hunter said, brushing down his cloak, calm as could be.
Jordan released a surprised laugh—a reaction to the shock, he knew, since there was nothing remotely funny about what had just happened. “You don’t say.”
Hunter’s dark eyes fell upon him. “You have a good arm. I wondered for a second there if you were going to freeze up on me, but you came through in the end. Well done.”
The praise felt like liquid sunshine flooding Jordan’s veins. He couldn’t remember the last time someone who he looked up to had offered him such a compliment. His father certainly hadn’t ever—
Jordan gritted his teeth and slammed the breaks on his train of thought. He turned his gaze downward to the Hyroa and replied with a quiet, but heartfelt, “Thanks.”
If Hunter heard the emotion in his voice, he didn’t comment on it. Instead, he said, “Let’s do this quickly so we can—”
The teacher’s head snapped up and his eyes unfocused as he looked beyond the trees surrounding them, peering deeper into the dark of the forest.
Jordan reached for his daggers again, certain that another Hyroa attack was imminent—and this time there was no knockout cocktail to throw at it.
Heart crashing beneath his ribs, Jordan was so tense that he jumped when Hunter spun towards him and wrapped his fingers around his arm.
“Activate your gift on both of us. Now!”
Hearing the urgency in Hunter’s
voice, Jordan didn’t hesitate. But he was slower to react when Hunter issued his next order.
“The Hyroa, too—quick!”
More tentative this time, Jordan pressed his free hand against the beast’s hide. He shuddered at the feel of the coarse hair against his bare fingers and had to will himself not to leap back when its chest rose and fell under his hand. Instead, he gritted his teeth and transcended it as well.
A feeling of bone-weary fatigue hit him almost instantly, the effect of having used his gift for over an hour already, combined with the stress of the attack they’d just survived. He would have been okay if it was just him, but transcending others always required more concentration, more energy. If he had to keep up his gift on the three of them for long, Hunter would be carrying him back to the academy, after all.
“What—”
Hunter’s free hand slapped over Jordan’s mouth and the teacher leaned in to whisper in his ear, barely audible, “Not a sound.”
Even after the Hyroa had almost eaten him whole, Hunter had been unruffled. Jordan was therefore alarmed to note that, for the first time since they’d arrived in the forest, his teacher sounded fearful. No, not just fearful—panicked. That more than anything had Jordan following his order, barely breathing in an effort to remain as still and silent as possible.
Hunter’s reaction told him only one thing: that whatever was coming must be worse than a Hyroa.
Barely two minutes later, Jordan understood.
… Because that was when Aven stepped out of the shadows and stopped barely three feet away from them.
Five
If Hunter’s grip hadn’t increased to bone-crushing levels, Jordan wasn’t sure what he would have done. Perhaps tried to run, perhaps made a sound of alarm…
… Perhaps lunged forward with his daggers raised, intent on sinking them into Aven no matter how impossible he knew such a feat would be.
Instead, Hunter’s fingers were like a vice around his upper arm, the warning unmistakable.
“Kenn naha Sarnaph rolaren,” Aven said, his voice raising the hairs on Jordan’s arms and sending a trickle of sweat down his spine.
Hunter took his hand from Jordan’s mouth and in a soundless, barely there movement, reached into his Shadow Cloak. Jordan’s eyes remained locked on Aven but it was hard to ignore Hunter when he shoved a small bud straight into Jordan’s ear, doing the same for himself with a second bud. Only Jordan’s self-preservation instincts kept him from making a what-the-hell noise, but he had an answer almost straight away when Aven continued speaking and Jordan realised he could understand the Meyarin language perfectly thanks to whatever device Hunter had given him.
“I could have sworn one was headed this way.”
Jordan wondered if Aven was talking to himself, but then two other Meyarins stepped out of the forest beside him, one male, one female, both familiar. The female Jordan had initially encountered when he, Alex, D.C. and Bear had visited Meya for the first time all those months ago, with her guarding the entrance to the palace along with Alex’s later pseudo-bodyguard, Zain. Vaera was her name, if Jordan recalled correctly. But last he’d known, she hadn’t been in cahoots with Aven.
Now, however, Jordan knew that Aven had Claimed all Meyarins who hadn’t escaped the ancient city when he took the throne—meaning that she was now a member of his blood-bonded army.
Unlike Vaera, Jordan had only met the male Meyarin, Skraegon, during his time spent as Aven’s puppet, and he was easily one of the foulest beings Jordan had ever had the displeasure of crossing paths with. Despite his immortal grace, Skraegon looked and acted like a common thug. His face was set into a perpetual sneer, and the few times Jordan had seen him, he’d been seconds away from starting a brawl—and had indeed done so twice when Aven hadn’t been there to step in smoothly to deviate his attention.
It was strange seeing Aven accompanied by Vaera and Skraegon—and even stranger was their being in the middle of the forest in the early hours of the morning. The coincidence of timing and location was uncanny, enough that Jordan was frozen to the spot, wondering what was going to happen next.
Emotions were flooding his system, fear strong amongst them, but so too was anger. Because in front of him stood the person responsible for the recent hell he’d been through, the hell he’d barely survived. Aven was mere steps away and it seemed as if he had no idea Jordan was standing right there. All it would take was—
Hunter’s grip tightened yet again, painful enough for Jordan to wince. He turned accusing eyes on his teacher, but Hunter just shook his head, yet another warning clear in his eyes.
Jordan blanched, realising that whatever possible future his teacher’s gift had just shown him, it likely didn’t work out in Jordan’s favour. So instead of giving in to his fury and throwing caution to the wind in order to attempt physical revenge on Aven, Jordan sucked in a calming—but silent—breath and nodded once, letting Hunter know he wouldn’t do anything stupid. The teacher’s grip only eased a fraction, but that, at least, was telling enough that he believed Jordan. Or that the next future he saw didn’t lead to any… unwanted consequences.
“The Sarnaph was here, all right,” Skraegon replied to Aven, his keen dark eyes peering closely at the ground.
In a voice hardly more than a monotone, Vaera added, “It appears it was in a scuffle, perhaps a dominance challenge by another of its kind. But the tracks just disappear. The forest is too thick here to see any more.”
Skraegon was still glancing around as if searching for more clues, even looking upwards towards the nearest tree, a furrow between his heavy brow as if he was debating whether it managed to climb off the forest floor—something Jordan knew the beast was anatomically incapable of doing, at least according to Alex.
“I don’t have time for this,” Aven snarled. He spun on his heel and jabbed a finger at Vaera and Skraegon. “Don’t return until it’s dead. Along with any others you can find. The less of them there are, the less the mortals can use against us.”
Jordan raised his eyebrows, starting to understand what Hunter had meant about Alex’s unorthodox request coming in the near future. Hyroa blood, Jordan had recently learned, was poisonous—even fatal—to Meyarins. But it seemed Aven was two steps ahead of them if he was already actively hunting them to keep their blood from being used against the immortal race.
Come to think of it, the Hyroas as a race were already close to extinction. Jordan wondered how much of that was thanks to Aven and his clear attempts at exterminating the creatures. Just how many years had he spent hunting down and eradicating the beasts?
Jordan didn’t have time to think more about that before a fourth Meyarin arrived out of what appeared to be thin air. Jordan didn’t recognise this female, but knew she must have used the Valispath—the invisible rollercoaster also known as the Eternal Path—even if his human eyes hadn’t been capable of seeing anything more than her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it arrival.
Without a word—at least outwardly—Aven and the female disappeared, and Jordan realised he must have mentally called her to deliver him from the forest since, as Jordan well knew, Aven was still disinherited and thus unable to activate the Valispath on his own. He would remain that way as long as Prince Roka was alive, his metaphorical wings clipped. It was a small mercy, but Jordan was nonetheless grateful.
However, even with Aven now gone, the threat hadn’t disappeared, since both Vaera and Skraegon had remained.
“This is stupid.” Skraegon kicked at the foliage under his feet. “I have better things to be doing than hunting some beast through the night.”
“I’m sure Faluh is anxiously awaiting your return to her bedchamber,” Vaera said, her tone no longer monotonous but rather dripping with derision.
Ignoring her, Skraegon said, “I don’t see why Aven’s favourite pet couldn’t have come in our stead. Everyone knows he’s the best Sarnaph hunter in Meyarin history. Or he was, before Taevarg.”
“Niyx was a lot of things before
Taevarg,” Vaera said, and Jordan was surprised to hear a note of sadness in her voice.
Jordan, on the other hand, felt fury welling up within him all over again at the mention of Niyx—Aven’s best friend and the Meyarin responsible for killing King Astophe. Jordan had met him, just the once, during his first trip to Meya with his friends. The then-prisoner had been dragged up from his cell deep in the bowels of Taevarg and he’d had the audacity to accuse Alex of being one of Aven’s Garseth—one of the Rebels.
As far as Jordan was concerned, Niyx was scum. As Aven’s right-hand man, he was almost as dangerous as the Rebel Prince himself. Perhaps more so, since he’d managed the impossible and escaped from the supposedly impenetrable prison in order to execute Meya’s true monarch and secure Aven’s seat on the throne.
Niyx’s loyalty to Aven and his anti-mortal cause was unparalleled. More than that, his skill was legendary. Jordan had heard the rumours while under Aven’s Claim—that Niyx had trained with Meya’s elite guard and was considered one of the most talented Zeltora recruits of all time, his skill with a blade unmatched throughout the ages. But he was also the firstborn son of a high-ranking family in the Meyarin Court and he chose to put aside his duty as a protector of his people to instead live the expectations borne to someone of his station. He exchanged honour for power—a decision that led him to Aven and then, later, into a prison cell for thousands of years.
Given Jordan’s own background, he understood more than anyone about the pressure to live up to family expectations. But unlike Niyx, Jordan had chosen to be his own man, to turn aside from his family and forge his own path in life—a path that led him to Bear, and then later to Alex and D.C., all of whom became his family. In choosing Aven, Niyx had chosen wrong. Plain and simple. And Jordan couldn’t help looking forward to the day his decision would come back to haunt him.
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” Vaera continued, shaking off whatever thoughts had momentarily upset her. “Niyx wasn’t an option for tonight since he took off after the meeting earlier and no one has seen him since.”